It’s criminal to make toy guns look too real

Updated 4:12 pm, Wednesday, January 7, 2015

When Matthew Hoffman pulled a gun on police officers at Mission Station Sunday evening, he knew exactly what was going to happen. Although it was only a BB gun, the replica looked so realistic he expected officers to open fire.

They did, killing the 32-year-old Hoffman. In the days since the shooting, we’ve learned that Hoffman used the gun to commit “suicide by cop,” saying in a note they’d ended the life “of a man too cowardly to do it himself.”

Unfortunately, police officers mistaking a replica for a real gun has become a familiar news narrative. On Oct. 22, 2013, 13-year-old Andy Lopez was fatally gunned down in Santa Rosa when a sheriff’s deputy thought his “airsoft” rifle was a real assault weapon.

So the obvious solution is to find a way to make toy or replica guns easy to identify.

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Unfortunately, it isn’t as easy as it sounds.

In September Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill co-sponsored by state Sens. Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, and Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa. The Imitation Firearm Safety Act will require BB, pellet and air guns to be either brightly colored or marked with prominent fluorescent strips.

Evans, who has concluded her term and is now in private law practice, says the law will take effect in June 2016. But while the bill was hailed as a major step to making sure “a toy should look like a toy,” as Evans said at the signing, she admits it isn’t a panacea.

“It’s like a big mushy pillow,” she said this week. “You push in one side, and it pushes out the other. It is only a very small part of the solution.”

Ryan Podesta, who owns Thirty First Outfitters in Cotati and sells paintball and airsoft guns, is not convinced.

“There are real guns out there that are pink and blue and every other color under the sun,” he said. “And if someone had a gun that was pink, what would stop him from coloring that gun black?”

Challenge for parents

In fact, both Hoffman and Lopez were carrying guns that did not have the distinctive orange mark on the tip of the barrel required by federal law for toy guns. As Podesta says, kids and paintball players may want the most realistic-looking replica.

“When you were a kid and your parents bought you a toy gun, they didn’t get you the pink one or the clear one,” he said. “That’s not what you wanted.”

Even Evans, a mother of three, admits it can be challenging, despite her best efforts.

“I prevented my son from buying (toy) weapons,” she said. “But he used sticks or picked up guns from a friend.”

There are even some alarmists who say the bad guys may paint up their guns to make them appear to be harmless to get the drop on cops.

That’s when I say enough is enough. There are plenty of problems with legislation like this, and we should certainly have a dialogue about gun culture in America. But that doesn’t mean marking replica guns isn’t a good idea.

As San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr says, “Coloring toys so there is no mistaking them for real guns is only good common sense. Seems like a no-brainer to me.”

I agree. The best solution would be if toy and replica gun manufacturers would produce products that clearly are not authentic. Many paintball guns, for example, look nothing like real guns.

That’s not going to happen, at least in the short run. As long as there’s a market for realistic toys, someone is going to create them and claim they are exercising their rights in a free-market economy.

A worthy pursuit

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue the fight to push them to make replicas identifiable. And if a criminal really does disguise his gun to look fake, as Suhr says, “There would be no mistaking why this was done” — the guy is dangerous.

Current measures may not be the full solution, but we need to keep making the attempt. Because this is a problem with multiple victims and no winners — including the cops.

“It is certainly worth continuing to write and talk about this,” Evans said. “No cop gets up in the morning and says he wants to shoot an innocent kid in the street.”